One of Us Buried by Johanna Craven (year 2 reading books TXT) 📕

contours of her speech. “He’s the worst of all them lobster bastards. Full of hate.”

Heat prickled my neck. But curiosity had me glancing back over my shoulder.

The lieutenant was somewhere between thirty and forty, I guessed. His hair was coffee-coloured and straight, slightly overgrown. A sculpted, faintly handsome face, but one that held neither kindness nor malice. There was a blankness to him. An emotionlessness. He looked too empty to be capable of hate.

His pale eyes shifted, catching mine. I looked away, my heart jolting. I pedalled the spinning wheel harder, focusing on the steady rhythm of the thing until the soldier’s footsteps disappeared back down the stairs.

“I saw the raft come in this morning,” the woman beside me said once my chaotic spinning had slowed. “Were your journey all right then? Did the most of you survive?”

I nodded. “The most of us, yes.” We’d lost just four women on the journey; a number I knew enough to be grateful for. Their deaths had not been announced to us, nor were we allowed on deck for their burials. We’d just assumed them dead when they’d never returned from the surgeon’s cabin.

“You’re English,” said the woman, making it sound like something of an insult. “Your ship come in from London then?”

I nodded.

She made a noise from the back of her throat. “What’s your name?”

“It’s Nell,” I told her. “Nell Marling.”

Her hazel eyes shifted, as though debating whether to trust me. “Lottie Byrne,” she said finally, giving me a ghost of a smile. The warmth of the gesture filled me with relief. I hadn’t realised how much I was craving kindness.

“You’ll be all right, Nell,” Lottie said, her eyes back on the wheel. “We do our best to look out for each other. There’s no one else going to do that for us.”

*

When dusk fell over the factory, bells rang and spinning wheels slowed. Women climbed from their stools and spread out around the edges of the room, claiming their belongings, their squares of floor, their children. Some, I saw, had brought their threadbare blankets from the prison ships. Others upended sacks of oily wool and curled up on them between the spinning wheels.

No beds in the factory, but room on the floor for perhaps thirty. Room for less than half the women whose hands were red and raw from weaving Parramatta cloth. No space for any of us who had just climbed off the barge. The superintendent herded us towards the stairwell.

“Where are we to go?” Hannah asked.

“I don’t care. Find yourself lodgings somewhere in town.”

A humourless laugh escaped me. This was a joke, surely. Find lodgings? With what money? All I had to my name were my shin-length skirts and a pair of old stockings.

I stepped blankly out of the factory, flanked by the other women from the Norfolk. I followed them over a rickety wooden bridge, back towards the main street. After the stench of the factory, the air smelled fragrant and clean. Birds shrieked, swooping and zigzagging through a pink and lilac sky.

I had been expecting bars and locked gates, like the cell I had languished in at Newgate. But my incarceration here was disguised as freedom. I saw then that there was little point in restraining us. In the fading daylight, the surrounding forest was a shadow. But I could see there was no end to it. The land was so vast it was dizzying. Only a madwoman would turn her back on the meagre security offered by the settlement.

I heard Lottie call my name. I spun around, achingly glad to see her.

“How do we go about finding lodgings?” I wrapped my arms around myself, wishing for a cloak or shawl.

She nodded to the street ahead of us. “They have lodgings.”

Word of our arrival, it seemed, had reached the men of Parramatta. They stood on the edge of the street in clusters, reminding me of the men who had come trawling through the Norfolk in search of wives. But these were no well-dressed settlers, or soldiers with polished buttons. These men were grime-streaked and ragged, with scruffy beards and unwashed skin. Men, I knew with certainty, who had been sent here on His Majesty’s pleasure. I recognised the dejected slope of their shoulders, the dulled anger in their eyes.

They called out to us. Shelter and fire. Four shillings a week. Come on lass, you can do no better.

“We’re to lodge with these men?” I coughed.

“Four shillings a week,” Lottie said flatly. “For shelter and fire.”

“Four shillings a week?” I repeated. “How am I to pay that?”

Lottie said nothing. My jaw tightened as the reality of the situation swung at me. We were that precious commodity of soft skin and curves. A novelty here in this land of men.

“They’re willing to bargain,” she said finally. “They’ll give you a little coin as well as extra food and lodgings.” She gave me a wry smile. “A fine deal.”

“You do this?” I asked. “Sell yourself for a bed?”

She pressed her lips into a thin white line. I wondered if I had offended her with my sharpness.

I swallowed the sickness in my throat. “I’ll sleep on the street.”

“Don’t be mad. You want to be torn to pieces by the savages?”

A hot ribbon of fear ran through me, but I pushed it away. I’d heard talk of the savages, of course; wild warriors who could throw four spears in the time it took to load a flintlock pistol. I’d convinced myself they were little more than a myth. The savages hiding in the dark was a fear I didn’t have room for.

Head down, I began to walk. Away from the factory, away from the men. I had no thought of where I was going. There was nothing in this place. I just needed to keep moving.